Captain Ed, lamenting the “do-nothing” Democratic congress:
Now, given the fact that the Democrats still have not produced a budget, nor have followed through on most of their election pledges except when they squeezed the minimum-wage increase into the funding package George Bush requested for the Iraq war, why should they reduce their work week? With overdue appropriations, one would expect people with their purported tough work ethic to start working through a few weekends to meet fiscal deadlines. Instead, they’re spending their time passing resolutions on genocides in which no current nation took part, which will alienate a strategic ally in a theater of war.
Read the whole ‘analysis,’ and then ask yourself, what key word is missing? I will give you a hint- it starts with “F” and ends with “R.”
Protip- It isn’t “fucker.”
Tom Gellhaus
Filibuster ! – and I didn’t check the link, I swear.
(what do I win?)
Jess
It’s FIL…something. Darn, I almost had it.
Zifnab
Hey, and look, Captain Ed is once again totally full of it.
Anybody who’s surprised, raise your hand. Come on. Anybody? Really?
August J. Pollak
Well, to be fair, you can’t filibuster in the House. But Democrats have already voted on nearly twice the legislation Republicans did, and they’ve passed student loan reform, a minimum wage increase, and with the greatest bipartisan cooperation in years, they passed the SCHIP renewal… which Bush sadly vetoed.
So… yeah. What the others were saying about the Admiral being full of crap.
John Cole
I was under the impression that Congress contained both the House and the Senate.
August J. Pollak
Yes, but Ed’s post is all about Pelosi and the lamentations of house Dems. The Senate filibusters are an equally problematic but separate issue.
Pb
Foreigner?
Quackers
I think since the Republicans are now the party of The Endless Threat To Filibuster, why not actually make them do it? Let them start exercising their pie holes 24/7 and use what they have to say in campaign ads against them.
canuckistani
What’s wrong with “fucker”? I think it fits in there just fine.
RSA
“Firetrucker”.
Evinfuilt
Thats the worst of it. If they threaten to Filibuster, the Dems cave. The closest thing we’ve seen to a Filibuster this year is the Dems sleep-over stunt, which didn’t work. It make them look like the idiots instead of the real idiots (well actually, I take that back, the spineless Dems are acting like true idiots.)
John Cole
And let’s not get into the stuff that was dumped into their laps as the Republicans did nothing for the last few months they were in office. Combined with the oversight catching up, the myriad of current and past problems, the filibuster, and a host of other things (by the way, there is a war going on), and blaming the Democrats, at this point, is partisan gasbaggery.
If Ed wants them to do more, maybe they should waste less time condemning MoveOn.
Ned Raggett
Freeper. Because lord knows we need more of them in Congress.
Lee
FlamingGayToeTapper?
SDM
Posted as a comment over there, awaiting approval. I wonder if it passes muster…
“The kicker is that they can’t even blame this one on Bush.
Well, unless you count the fact that several of their priorities – a war funding bill with a binding timetable, a stem cell research bill, and SCHIP re-authorization – were vetoed by Bush. That’s undeniable.
“Republicans are blocking legislation” isn’t just a whiny Democratic talking point. It’s true. There is a 60-vote requirement to pass anything in the Senate. This is a strategy designed to make sure Congress does nothing. Some examples:
Change of Course in Iraq.
Feb. 5, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Minimum Wage Increase.
Jan. 24, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Lobbying Reform.
Jan. 17, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Medicare Price Negotiation.
April 18, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Greater Rest Periods for U.S. Troops Between Deployments.
July 11, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Employee Free Choice Act.
June 26, 2007 Blocked by Republican Senate Caucus.
Energy Reform.
June 21, 2007 Blocked by Senate Republican Caucus.
Intelligence Authorization Bill
April 17, 2007 Blocked by Senate Republican Caucus.
Every one a promise made by Democrats in 2006, passed in the House, blocked in the Senate.
Take credit for blocking a bad agenda! Say, “these were bad bills and we didn’t let them happen.” But to pretend that GOP obstruction is just a talking point, that it doesn’t exist, is silly and misleading.”
ThymeZone
If the people want a do-something congress in a time of partisanship, then they need to find a way to give the majority party more than 49 reliable votes in the Senate.
Otherwise this kind of “commentary” and virtually 100% of punditorrhea and blogorrhea are not only useless, they are toxic and damaging. They obscure the realities of the situation and keep people (the local commentariat is a fine example) happily hyperventilating and doing absolutely nothing to either understand, or ultimately fix, the real problem. The government has been ruined by the party that told you that government was no good. The only remedy you have is more seats in congress for the other party. 2004 was a small step in the right direction. The next, larger step is still needed.
The rules are set up to prevent tyranny by narrow majority, and it’s damn lucky for us that they are.
The days of a slim congressional majority finding votes on the other side of the aisle to “get things done” are over, if they ever existed at all. Every member of congress knows that congress is never popular, that all congressional elections are local, and that the people won’t take the time to understand the real dynamics. They will therefore play these games and they don’t give a shit about the public perceptions, and neither would anyone here if they were in one of those seats. Congress is all about the parties, the machines, the caucuses and — first, last and always — the actual vote counts on any given measure.
Nothing.Else.Matters. Maybe it’s hard for a blog that was spawned from the world of perception and theater to understand a world that does not operate, at its core, on perception and theater? What goes on in the hallways in front of the cameras is all for your amusement. What goes on on the floor is about that graph at WaMo.
If you want the theater to actually mean anything, you have to make it relevant to the graph. Right now, it isn’t.
jnfr
TZ links to the graph I was also thinking of, which was orginally produced by McClatchy. The time series tells the story.
I’ve always thought the Dems need to force a filibuster to really be a filibuster. None of this “gentleman’s agreement” shit.
Zifnab
TZ, we’re totally agreeing here. Filibusters are bad when you are the majority party. The only way to break a barage of filibusters is to get 67 reliable votes. That said, even if we doubled the number of Senate Seats we claimed last year, that would only give us a 62 seat majority. Five shy of filibuster-breaking. Republicans can still, potentially, bottle up Congress well past ’09.
Johnson broke the Civil Rights Filibuster back in ’67 by effectively cutting off federal funding to southern states. He starved the Senators until they caved. I don’t know if that will work in ’09, when Republicans feel like they have nothing to lose by letting their states suffer. The Dems need to get smarter, and they need to pro-actively start hunting for ways to break the filibusters they should know are coming.
Unfortunately, when you’ve got turn-coats like the DINOs that supported the MoveOn condemnation, its questionable whether you can even get those 62 Senators to vote reliably. But just because the situation is difficult doesn’t mean the constituency will accept failure on the part of Dem leadership. Dems want some real victories.
Face
Stupid moonbat. 9/11 changed everything.
Sojourner
Absolutely. How else can you keep Harry Reid, the Republican minority leader, from putting forward legislation legalizing warrantless wiretapping on the American people, condemning MoveOn for a newspaper ad, and supporting Bush’s laying the groundwork for attacking Iran by calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization?
jnfr
Gaaah! The Dems so need to find some balls.
ThymeZone
Good point. I detested the man as president, but as a legislator, he was truly a force to be reckoned with, whether you agreed with his agenda or not.
Progressive advances have, in our history, depended heavily on strong leadership.
Yes we are agreeing. I hope you find this as scary as I do :)
Tim F.
Are you on crack? House Dems passed most of the agenda that they promised in 2006. They laid some eggs (FISA) but overall Pelosi’s record of achievement puts any Republican Congress to shame. Too bad all of her good work dies in the Senate.
zzyzx
My favorite spin on the F word is how NRO now casually refers to bills needing 60 votes to pass. It’s not a filibuster; it’s just the no’s winning. Really! They just hope that no one remembers those distant days of Summer 2004 when the filibuster was the worst thing ever created by a legislative body…
Peter Johnson
But they punted on immigration reform. And they’re dragging their heels on Iraq funding. It’s a mixed picture at best.
Zifnab
It’s all for naught anyway. The legislation gets buried in the Senate or (in the case of Stem Cells, Iraq Timetables, or SCHIP) killed by a veto. And that’s that.
Immigration Reform wouldn’t have seen any further success. Iraq funding will just get vetoed again and again while the President screams “Support the Troops!” If you want to see legislation get proposed, we’ve got that covered. If you want to see legislation pass, wait till ’09.
Tim F.
Haha, the GOP punted itself on immigration reform. The civil war that destroyed that bill had nothing to do with Pelosi or the Democrats.
SDM
My earlier comment wasn’t approved yet, but I left this one, too:
“This session, the House has taken rather a lot of genuine, substantive policy votes.
Here are some of the bills that have passed in the House – leaving aside the many budgetary and supplemental bills that were passed. Most of these drew substantial GOP support. Some of these died in the Senate or were vetoed. Are these bills good policy? Decide on a case-by-case basis. But they’re all substantive legislation.
9/11 Commission Recommendations
Minimum Wage
Stem Cell Research
Drug Price Negotiation
Student Debt Relief
Energy Reform
Contracting Accountability
Whistleblower Protection
Employee Free Choice Act
Foreign Investment Reform
Small Business Tax Relief
Shareholder Rights
Veterans’ Health Care
Gulf Coast Housing Relief
Lobbying Reform
Housing Reform
Farm Bill
College Cost Reduction
Renewable Energy
SCHIP
Fair Pay
Regional Infrastructure Development
Small Business Investment
Iran Counter-proliferation
Patent Reform
Does that clear things up?”
gex
Odd how threatening to filibuster absolutely everything tends to prevent legislation from being passed. Who knew?
guyermo
fornicator
’nuff said
D-Chance.
Not to get off-track, but this little gem keeps popping up. The one about our “strategic ally”, which means Turkey. You know, the country that’s currently amassing soldiers along the Iraq border and ready to flood into the Kurdish region for an all-out war with the ONE section of Iraq that we assumed was stable. THAT strategic ally.
Dixie
So perhaps the f to r word is not relative to Congress but relative to Captain Ed’s column.
That would make the missing element “factchecker.”
Rome Again
I’m with guyermo, I think fornicator is the right word. ;)
SDM
Incidentally, neither of my comments were approved. Maybe the missing word is “fair.”